The facility, such as it was, was coming apart. Pipes and struts loosed from the walls and upper walkways rained down. Interlocking metal pieces that comprised the superstructure bowed and distended. Valves and other compartments burst under extreme pressure, leaking steam and oils. It seemed that the greatest problem with a clockwork lair was that everything was connected; if something broke, everything broke. Commander Zideo’s loosing of the magical warp winds within the closed system was wreaking catastrophic and cascading failures across the system–for it was a system, not just a structure.
I did not mean to forsake my human. I did not intend to leave him behind, but my ability to reach him was cut off when something metallic snapped high above me, and I was forced to roll out of the path of a veritable waterfall of heavy bolts and other components larger and heavier than my own body. They cut off my path back to Zideo quite literally, breaking the outer access ring and leaving ragged claws of metal reaching toward the rumbling gear-works below.
I saw Zideo, through smoke and a fluttering mesh. He saw me. He knew that I would not abandon him, even in the face of impossibility, so he shouted to Helmgarth instead. “Run!” The seneschal’s feet were glued to the ground. He looked very heroic there, in his current thin beard and hair blown by the hot winds pacing the inside of the lair. He wanted to help just as badly as I did, but we were both powerless.
Xue-Fang produced the Crystallicer and fired a pair of streaking icy beams at my human, who jumped and dodged quite deftly in a micro-burst of flame. I lost track of him.
“Come on, love,” said Helmgarth. “Maybe we can find a way around. Maybe we can help!”
We could not see Addrion. We could also not see the shovel-wielding bear, which was worse. She radiated a murderous aura to me, and I was more concerned about her getting Zideo than about Xue-Fang.
Although I did not know to go, we made our way, taking any route that was still usable in this rapidly deteriorating place. Around the outside of the Court of Clocks, across passageways through which the damage afforded us a view of the fight–or rather, the chase. I say with some pride that the same aptitude for running and jumping that had saved me over the auto-scrolling river kept me alive in this nearly unnavigable building. It was more than a building–it was a clockwork monster using its dying throes to try to swallow us whole. Here, a metal grating fell just in time for us to run across it before it tilted over and fed into the maw below. There, a series of piston-tops surged up and down slowly enough for us to use them as a shifting stairway. Helmgarth hoisted me safely across a gap over bent clock tines; I caught him by the sleeve when he almost didn’t clear it himself.
We were ambushed by a monstrous impersonation of DuChamp. The shirtless wrestler mayor could speak no words, nor recognize us, only attack with grasping hands. He hurled and shoved us, scarcely noticing when I attacked his legs. We dodged and jumped for our lives, but his merciless advance eventually overcame us both. He held us each in a separate hand, roaring. It was almost as though he were trying to tell us something. Whatever conflicted impulses drove him to this madness were vented by hurling us both through the doorway of a chamber that was midway through falling down to the level below, its ceiling and wall ripped free and its contents spilling like a sack of dogfood opened by a enterprising canine without the knowledge of his human.
A familiar trio of glyphs flashed in the air: “GO!”
I noticed that the ruddy, venous monster incarnation of DuChamp could not cross the gap he had thrown us across. He railed at the heavens from the other side, then stopped, his eyes halting on something above us, which I could not see for smoke clutter.
There is no sense in trying to describe the chamber we found ourselves in. It may have recently been a sizable room, a habitation of some kind. The floor sank on one side into a nearly vertical drop, out of which sparks and sour fumes gushed upward. The ceiling there just sort of stopped existing, giving me the feeling of being in two spaces at once–a room, and a great room, just like when I would take a nap on the threshold between Lisa’s kitchen and her high-ceilinged den.
Little by little, the scattered contents of the room slid a little farther toward the edge, moving with every shudder that ran echoing through the struts and walls, vibrating through the metallic skeleton beneath.
I smelled jerky.
DuChamp screamed like an animal (I should know), and the walkway beneath him gave way. He was lost beneath oil-black smoke and churning gears. I had seen before what they had done to the crystalliced trooper. It left little doubt in my mind of DuChamp’s fate. That I could not see it was a fleeting kindness.
“Look, love!” said Helmgarth. He held his backpack. Empty as it was, it took me a moment to realize what he held, which sagged like molted snakeskin. His eyes darted around the room. Microscopes, tweezers and scalpels, tools for delicate research… and the foldable rectangle that I recognized from the caves of the Blunderworld. Not far from it, Zideo’s book sat closed on a workbench. Beside it, saws of various types and a prybar sat in a pile.
Helmgarth was hurriedly buckling the backpack across his shoulders when the shudder came. The rectangle slid across the floor heading toward the enormous gash between metal and rubber sealant where the sparks mingled with smoke. “No!” he shouted, but was too slow. I pounced. I am not proud to have so compromised my integrity that I took a page out of the feline playbook, slapping my front paws downward over it as I jumped and pinning it to the ground; but I did so in service of my human, and I feel it is important to tell all in an account such as this, though it cost me my reputation among my howling neighborhood fur-brethren. So be it.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The floor tilted, and I was forced to dig in with one paw, curling my toes painfully into the lattice of brushed steel below us. The book fell off the work bench and went careening–oddly, I thought, and more like a brick than a book, refusing to open its pages–past me. Helmgarth dove without the slightest regard for his own life, and I snapped at his shirt with my jaws. A moment later, he held the book in one hand, and I held both him and the foldable rectangle.
It was, as humans sometimes say, a little touch and go. There was flailing and slobbering and straining, and in the end Helmgarth squirreled away (a vile term, no?) both items into his backpack with the prestidigitation he was so good at, causing them to disappear with ease. I am not sure who hauled whom back up to safety. Perhaps we hauled each other.
Helmgarth gave me a jerky while he looked for a route out of this room, although it was relatively stable, all told. A plume of smoke billowed from behind us, and something very strange went clattering past into the abyssal smoky maw–something plastic, a dark device shaped like that one glyph of human english, “T,” but with a single orange dot. It did not even hear its demise within the crunching gears.
Helmgarth reached for it futilely, a symbolic gesture that he hastened to cover up. He changed the subject as if I might ask him about it.
“We need a path out of here, love,” he said, looking around. “Before this whole place tears itself apart, and us with it.” I heard the swift clamor of feet against a railing somewhere, fading above the din of the gear-works, but I did not think it was Zideo’s.
We took what footsteps were available to us, climbing a huge pendulum like a ramp. Although the shifting nature of the failing lair made it difficult to get my bearings, I thought we had to be higher up than the Court of Clocks was, wherever it was. I wondered about dragging the pendulum with us, and providing Zideo with an escape ramp, but it was much too heavy to carry for either or both of us.
Behind us, the entire laboratory went sideways, spilling the last of its contents into chewing cogs, which screeched to a halt with a sound so shrill and heinous that I howled with pain. Even Helmgarth threw his palms over his ears and stumbled. That force sent a shudder backing up through the hall, if hall it was, the unspent backflow of force with no outlet. “Uh oh,” said Helmgarth, and he scrambled for high ground. We felt a series of staccato snaps and breakages beneath us, through layers of broken clock parts. “Go! Go!” he urged, waving me upwards.
Things shifted fast, and a jet of hot steam power-washed the strut on which I had stood only moments before. We scrambled upwards, Helmgarth assisting me to climb when the going was vertical only, sometimes hoisting me disgracefully by the scruff between my shoulder blades.
Through some force I could not conceive of, an explosion sounded beside us, exiting a compartment below and firing upwards like a stopped firearm. It turned the walls and ceiling into a flower of ringing steel, strips of solid metal fanning outward like petals. I ceased to hear anything but a ringing, and Helmgarth threw his body over mine as steaming hot debris showered down onto us. When I could see again, I saw the outside world: threads of lava lighting the smoky wasteland. There was movement far off between the ravines of the Red Hot Caliente Zone–a horseman with a gleaming lance and a flowing dress.
Her retinue followed in her shadow, a couple dozen of her newfound followers, the vanguard of the reformed Street Tough army. How many they numbered by now, I could only guess. It did not matter, because a battalion of Ohmpressers were already marching out to meet her, ants marching in perfect rank and file across this charred land. The big stingray-shaped transports darkened the already dim sky, emerging from brown clouds to deliver more Ohmpressors, and more, and more.
Except for one. One was facing the other way, coming toward us. It escorted a great and serpentine air-transport followed, sagging with vast buckets that glowed in the sooty sky. It dove beneath the aerial mountain-chunks, illuminating the clouds it past between.
Helmgarth saw it, but did not know what to make of it. Had I known more English, I would have told him that Peligrosa was on one of those two craft.
So we ran. We crossed loose flywheels like icebergs over freezing seas. We skipped up flaps the rose and fell, timing our steps. We even swung from a chain, and landed a floor below where we intended, our original destination disintegrating in a crumble of twisting bars and cords before we reached it.
Just when I thought we would not find Zideo or Addrion, a scream echoed through a crushed hallway. It was my human, I was certain. The light of flames reflected dully on its scuffed floor, but it would be like crawling through a crushed can of Lisa’s White Claw, all jagged edges and points. Finding some semblance of curvature, I could tell we were once again just outside the Court and the throne room.
We crept carefully over the toppled walls and used the sideways guard rails as a ladder. How a dog accomplished this I will leave to your imagination, for I cannot remember it clearly and have few means of asking Helmgarth.
There, slumped against a railing, was a figure frozen in crystal and ice. We were too late.
The obscuring smoke was washed away by another of the roving gusts of wind, like the vengeful ghost of the warp conch seeking to cause more wreckage before it blew itself out. There was a beard, and sandals. The blank-eyed face that stared out at us in horror was not Zideo’s–it was that of Nereus. Helmgarth’s breath caught.
“We’ve got to get him out of here,” he said. “Only… neither of us can turn him back.”
We made our way out onto the precarious ledge. A beam of crystal-ice raked the mountain of debris, and suddenly Zideo was there with us, mid-leap. He was pushing off from the wall, if wall it could be called, when he saw us. “Um…!” he said, and burst into flame as he air dashed back toward the Court, which was now a wasteland of fire and off-kilter gears. Xue-Fang stood on a shaking walkway–the wide hour hand of the Court of Clocks, which had not yet been disrupted somehow. He held forth the crystallicer, and it gleamed with magic from across the room.
I will use what words I know to give you an idea of what happened next, as I fell.
* Cold
* Pain
* Clanking metal in my face
* Smoky sky
* Metal in my face again
* Smoky sky (repeat several times)
* BIG screech of metal
* Something went “Pa-tang!”